I think maybe the saddest thing about Bill O’Reilly’s consistent and ongoing denials of any sort of wrongdoing in the multitude of sexual harassment claims against him is the fact that he likely isn’t just blowing smoke. Bill probably truly, honestly believes that he didn’t do anything wrong. There are, of course, predators who know that what they do is wrong. Harvey Weinstein, for example, created a culture of silence and fear of ostracization in order to keep the women he assaulted from telling his secrets because he knew he was assaulting them.

Someone like Bill, however — and I think this perhaps extends to most right-wing talking heads, inasmuch as they never “break character,” despite their “characters” being ostensibly horrible, garbage humans — really does believe his own bullshit. And that’s just sad.

Inevitably, what follows a person’s determination that they’re being unduly persecuted for what they think should be viewed as minor infractions (if people are to take offense at all), is the kind of public self-pity that has made a man who was once as powerful as Bill O’Reilly was for decades look like the kind of asshole he looks like now that his sins are all out in the open. At every turn, his claims are proven wrong, and he still thinks that the fact that it’s all public is because people are out to “get” him.

On his pathetic web show No Spin News on Monday, Bill took it a step further. After a weekend of discussion of his payment of a $32 million settlement — which he inexplicably doesn’t understand makes him look hopelessly, overtly guilty — and the revelation that even his lawyer’s meager public defense in which Team O’Reilly claimed that nobody in the entire time he worked for Fox had ever complained about him, contradicted publicly by his former network co-star Megyn Kelly, was proved laughably false, Bill turned to the final target for his misplaced anger:

You know, am I mad at God? Yeah, I’m mad at him. I wish I had more protection. I wish this stuff didn’t happen. I can’t explain it to you. Yeah, I’m mad at him.”

In Bill’s world, there is no explanation other than that he has simply not had the proper “protection” from criticism or punishment or scrutiny. No, the only explanation can be that aside from the New York Times being “out to hurt people with whom they disagree,” which he also expressed on his show, he is simply being persecuted in a manner that not even God Almighty can shield him from.

Many predators believe these things, unfortunately, and many of them are even as bad as Bill O’Reilly when he utters the ultimate betrayal of women, of compassion, of culpability or responsibility, that he summed up his situation with:

It’s horrible what I went through, horrible what my family went through. The pain it brings to my children is indescribable. Indescribable.”

I think you mean what you put them through, Bill.

Featured image via Drew Angerer/Getty Images

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Written by Andrew Simpson

Andrew hates long walks on the beach, glitter, and men's rights activists. He can usually be found with his long-suffering wife, who can usually be found asking him to please not order onions on that burger, babe.